ABOUT NICS

Affiliations

The NICS center is a project under The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences (JICS).
JICS is a joint affiliation that has working collaborations with both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee. The NICS center at JICS is also an integral part of the XSEDE HPC infrastructure.

Three primary affiliations include The University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the NSF funded XSEDE resource provider.

High Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee promotes collaborations across many departments and enriches the contributions of our scientific community.

Overview

High Performance Computing (HPC) services provide access to resources for parallel computing-intensive research projects taking place on the Knoxville campus. In collaboration with the Office of Research, the NICS HPC center and other HPC groups enable research, faculty and students to increase their productivity and effectiveness by allowing them to outsource their computing infrastructure and support needs. The NICS center administers HPC resources, develops computing environment standards, and provides support and consultation for research projects which use these resources.

Overview

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) is the most advanced, powerful, and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. It is a single virtual system that scientists can use to interactively share computing resources, data, and expertise.

Scientists and engineers around the world use these resources and services—things like supercomputers, collections of data, and new tools—to make our lives healthier, safer, and better. XSEDE, and the experts who lead the program, will make these resources easier to use and help more people use them. Find out more about what scientists will do with the XSEDE infrastructure.

ORNL’s supercomputing program grows from humble beginnings to deliver the most powerful system ever seen. On the way, it helps researchers deliver practical breakthroughs and new scientific knowledge in climate, materials, nuclear science, and a wide range of other disciplines.

Overview

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of standing up a supercomputer 100 times more powerful than the leading systems of the day.

ORNL’s supercomputing program grows from humble beginnings to deliver the most powerful system ever seen. On the way, it helps researchers deliver practical breakthroughs and new scientific knowledge in climate, materials, nuclear science, and a wide range of other disciplines.

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of standing up a supercomputer 100 times more powerful than the leading systems of the day.

The facility delivered on that promise four years later in 2008, when its Cray XT “Jaguar” system ran the first scientific applications to exceed 1,000 trillion calculations a second (1 petaflop). The OLCF continued to expand the limits of computing power, and in June 2010 Jaguar became the world’s most powerful supercomputer, with 224,000-plus processing cores delivering a peak performance of more than 2.3 petaflops.

And now the OLCF has unveiled Titan, the world’s fastest computer with a peak performance of more than 27 petaflops, more than tenfold that of Jaguar.

Titan is unique among its peers due to its hybrid architecture—a combination of GPUs, traditionally used in video games, and the more conventional central processing units (CPUs) that have served as number crunchers in computers for decades. The complimentary combination of CPUs and GPUs will allow Titan to perform more computing operations using less power than previous generations of high-performance computers.

The OLCF gives the world’s most advanced computational researchers an opportunity to tackle problems that would be unthinkable on other systems. The facility welcomes investigators from universities, government agencies, and industry who are prepared to perform breakthrough research in climate, materials, alternative energy sources and energy storage, chemistry, nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and the gamut of scientific inquiry. Because it is a unique resource, the OLCF focuses on the most ambitious research projects—projects that provide important new knowledge or enable important new technologies.